Page 65 of The Half King
Cerise was almost certain that she didn’t have a parasite, because her symptoms had changed. Instead of the sensation of a thrashing fish in her stomach, she felt pressure rising behind her ribs. She kept patting her chest to release a bubble that didn’t exist.
To add to her troubles, Blue had grown so large that his sling wouldn’t hold him. His head came up past her knees. Now that he was the size of a hound, he could jump in and out of the wagon. Cerise couldn’t stop him from running away from the caravan, which he did several times a day. Often, he stayed gone for hours before returning with a dirty root or a sprig of leaves. She finally realized what he was doing when he nudged her hand toward the plants. It was the Mortara brush hound in him. He had sensed that she was sick, and he had brought remedies to make her feel better.
“My brilliant boy.” She hugged him close while turning the roots over in her hand to study them. “I don’t suppose you can tell me what to do with these.”
“We’ll give them to Nero,” Kian said from the other side of the canopy, where he had been riding so quietly she hadn’t known he was there. “If anyone knows how to use them, it will be him.”
When the caravan stopped for water, Nero ground up the roots and steeped them with the leaves to make the foulest tea Cerise had ever tasted. The drink didn’t spark her appetite or shrink the bubble in her chest, but it sent her into a deep, tranquil sleep for the rest of the day, which was the next best thing.
For the first time since the trip had begun, she felt no pain or fear. Instead, she dreamed that someone had carried her out of the wagon and into her tent and placed her atop a bundle of blankets. She crouched at the foot of her own body and studied herself. Her cheekbones were too sharp, and her eyelids were slightly sunken. Blue was asleep with his head resting on her thigh. He heard the sound of footsteps and jerked awake, but he noticed it was only Kian, and he yawned before laying his head down again.
The king patted Blue and stood next to Cerise, unaware of her dreaming body standing right beside him. His gaze was fixed on her sleeping form. She could tell from the way he kept rubbing his face and forgetting to breathe that he was worried about her. She tried to comfort him with a touch, but her hand wasn’t solid, and it passed through him.
He knelt down and placed a kiss on her sleeping forehead. The kiss was no more than a brush of contact, but Cerise touched her own skin and wished that she could feel it, wished that he could kiss her when she was awake.
The king glanced outside the tent at the last glimmer of sunset, and his body began to curl into shadow. She had seen him vanish before, but this time was different. Now a portal appeared in the air behind him, round and wide and swirling with gray mist. As Kian disappeared and his clothes fell to the floor, the doorway flashed, and all of a sudden, he was on the other side of it, naked and fully formed and walking away.
Slowly, the portal began to close. Cerise crept closer to the mist, wondering if she should try to enter it. This might be her only chance to find out where the king went at night. She glanced at her sleeping body and knew Blue would keep her safe. So she gulped a breath, stepped through the shrinking doorway, and followed Kian into the darkness.
On the other side of the portal, she became instantly solid—she could tell from the press of stone beneath her shoes and the air caressing her skin. Unlike Kian, she had kept her clothes, though she didn’t know why. She stood still and let her eyes adjust to the cool, colorless world.
A feeble glow emanated from above, like the moon filtered through a veil of clouds. It was enough to show her that nothing grew there, not a single weed or shrub. There was no dirt for anything to growin. All that existed was rock—tall, gray slabs forming passageways that sprawled in all directions. She couldn’t tell what the place was supposed to be. From her vantage point, it seemed like an enormous labyrinth. She looked down and noticed a glossy path on the ground, buffed smooth by countless feet. She hugged herself against a chill and stepped forward to see where it led.
The first passageway was deserted, so she continued around two more corners, where she reached an open courtyard strewn with crumbling marble benches arranged around a long-dry fountain. At the opposite end of the courtyard, four arched doorways led in different directions. She approached each one, finding them vacant. At the fourth doorway, she noticed a distant sound—a low drone like the buzzing of insects. Curious, she followed the noise for quite some time, turning corner after corner until her feet ached from rubbing against her sandals.
The louder the noise grew, the slower her steps became—not from the pain of walking but because she began to realize that insects weren’t making the sound.
It was human voices, hundreds of them, all groaning in a harmony of anguish.
At one point, she stopped.
Every instinct urged her to turn back. But she forced herself onward, thinking of Kian. If he could endure this every night, then she could experience it one time.
Before long, she happened upon two young men…if she could call them that, for each of them seemed to have lost whatever had made him a person. Their skin was waxy, their cheeks sunken. They looked at her as she passed, but there was no thought behind their eyes. The men swayed from side to side, wailing deliriously.
Around the next corner was a young woman on her hands and knees, sweeping aside imaginary objects as if searching for something. The woman froze, seeming to forget what she was looking for, and then she lowered her head and released a racking sob that was so heartrending—so completely devoid of hope—that Cerise had to blot the tears from her eyes.
None of the men or women looked older than twenty, and all of them had the dark skin and hair of the Mortara line. Legends had long claimed that firstborn Mortaras didn’t die, that they remained in the shadows forever. Now that Cerise had seen for herself that the rumors were true, she wished she could erase the knowledge from her mind. She didn’t want to know of such suffering. She didn’t want to see the evidence of how wrathful the goddess could be. It simply wasn’t fair.
Cerise backed away from the woman and retraced her steps to the vacant courtyard to try a different passage. She didn’t know how long she wandered. Hours must have gone by, because her eyelids were heavy, and twice she tripped over her own feet. She had nearly given up when she passed the entrance to a stone room, and there was Kian: his head down, sitting naked in the corner with both knees drawn to his chest.
He had never looked so small.
A piece of her heart fell away when she imagined all the nights he had spent like this. She crouched down in front of him and sighed. “No wonder you need stomach soothers.”
His head snapped up.
“Oh,” she said, waving a hand. “Can you see me?”
He stood up slowly and clung to the wall, inching away from her while shaking his head in horror. “No,” he breathed. “No, no, no.”
“Kian, it’s me.” She touched her chest. “It’s Cerise.”
He clapped a hand over his mouth. His gaze shimmered as if he might cry.
“It’s just me,” she added softly.
“I knew it,” he choked out. “I knew I shouldn’t have listened to you. Daerick told me you were lying about your courses. He has teenage sisters; he knows about these things.”
